Forming a Team

Competing

The steps are the same whether you teach ninth graders or seniors in college. What differs is which body you join, what it costs, who has to sign, and how early. This page sets the two paths side by side. Every program named here is linked from Competitive Simulations.

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Step 1. Pick the format before you pick the conference

The format decides how many students you need, what they have to learn, and what the year costs. Four honest starting points, and what each one asks of you at each level.

Format	High school	College
Mock trial	You enter through your state organization and work up a ladder; only the state champion goes to nationals. Budget $200 in state membership and $750 if you reach the national tournament.	The most generous terms anywhere for a new program. Register directly with the American Mock Trial Association: $225 for a new school against $550 for a returning one, and your first regional team is free.
Model Arab League	About $25 a delegate. Eight or more regional conferences a year plus a national high school conference.	$45 a delegate, flat, which is the lowest clearly published per-student cost in this column. Minimum five students per country.
Model United Nations	Most conferences require an adult faculty advisor and cap the delegation. Costs run $115 to $210 a delegate plus school and delegation fees.	No membership and no governing body; you register with each conference. Costs range from about $136 a student at the cheapest major conference to about $549 at the most expensive.
A policy competition rather than a negotiation	Euro Challenge, for grades 9 and 10, with regionals in March. Teams present policy recommendations to judges.	The Schuman Challenge charges no fee and pays travel and lodging for semi-finalists. The NASPAA simulation is entirely virtual. Start here if money is the obstacle.

The mistake that costs the most: choosing a conference because a colleague mentioned it, then discovering in January that the format needs eighteen students and you have six.

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Step 2. Find out what already exists

Before asking anyone for money, ask three questions. All three are commonly answered yes, and a lapsed program is far easier to restart than a new one is to found.

• Has anyone here ever done this? The association may still have the school on file, and an old coach may still be in the building.
• Where would the money come from? At both levels these teams are usually funded as student activities rather than out of an academic budget, which means the request goes on somebody else’s calendar, often a year ahead.
• Could it carry credit? At the college level this is the cleanest arrangement: Indiana University runs a preparation course with a one-credit simulation attached, so the students get credit for the work and the instructor gets contact hours to prepare them in.

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Step 3. Join in the order the association requires

This is where new programs lose a season, because two of these bodies will not let you register students until an earlier step has cleared, and one of them will not let a student do any of it.

If you are at a high school

1. Mock trial: find your state organization first. The national championship is a ladder, not an open tournament, so the state is your entry point and its calendar governs yours. If you want competition without qualifying, an open-enrollment invitational like Empire Mock Trial takes teams directly, homeschool teams included.
2. Moot court: there are two separate national high school bodies, and they work differently. One runs partner invitationals and regionals on a single annual case. The other runs online qualifiers from January to April, and students may enter through a school or independently, which matters if you have two interested students and no program.
3. Model UN: register the delegation directly with the conference. Expect to name an adult faculty advisor and to be capped at a delegation size.
4. Model Arab League: gather five students, register with country preferences, and the council assigns the country and gets in touch.
5. Boys State, Girls State and their national programs: selection runs through local American Legion posts, not through the school, so the path starts with a phone call to the post rather than a registration form.

If you are at a college

1. Mock trial: submit the annual school registration and pay. The registration fee is also your license to use the case in practice and in sanctioned competition. You do not choose your regional; the association assigns it and posts assignments just before Thanksgiving, so do not book travel before then. Teams are six to ten students.
2. Moot court, in this order and no other: a signed school authorization letter on the association’s template, ideally before the end of August. Only after it is approved may you pay membership. Only after that may you register teams, and registration opens in timed waves with per-tournament caps, first come first served. Students cannot do any of this themselves, because only the people named on the approved letter can register a team. Each student may compete in one regional, and the $200 per team is nonrefundable.
3. Model UN: no association and no membership. A faculty advisor registers with each conference, pays a school fee plus a per-delegate fee, and requests country preferences. At several of the larger conferences the rate is set by when your payment arrives, not by when you submit the form.
4. Model Arab League: the same three steps as the high school path, at $45 a delegate. The council publishes the plainest instructions of any body here for what a brand new program does first.
5. Model NATO and the other regional bodies: register a country delegation, typically with a minimum of six students, and the sponsors supply a handbook and agenda in advance.

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Step 4. Budget the lodging, not the fee

Registration almost never breaks a budget. Built only from published figures, before travel and meals, a college program looks like this:

• New mock trial program, one team of eight, one regional: about $225, roughly $28 a student.
• Model Arab League delegation at a regional conference: $45 a student, flat.
• Model UN delegation of twelve plus an advisor at the cheapest major conference: about $1,080 in fees and $557 in rooms, roughly $136 a student.
• The same delegation at the most expensive: about $2,150 in fees and $4,440 in rooms, roughly $549 a student.

Read those last two lines together. The fees differ by about $1,000 and the rooms by about $3,900, which is the whole argument for checking the lodging rules before the registration page. Several conferences either require the conference hotel or penalize staying elsewhere: one charges $150 per school per night off site, another $20 per delegate per night, and one charges $75 per person per day to attendees who sleep somewhere cheaper. The penalty is often larger than the saving.

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Step 5. Recruit more students than you need

• Expect attrition between signing up in September and travelling in February. Recruit above the minimum rather than exactly to it.
• Take students who have never done it. Competitive teams calcify quickly around the same four confident speakers.
• Structure the speaking rather than encouraging it. This is the one place where the research is blunt: a published attempt to close a participation gap by encouragement alone made the gap worse. Assign roles and turns instead, and rotate the demanding ones. What the Research Says has the citations.

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Step 6. Prepare them from the association’s own documents

Every association publishes the rules its conference runs on, and most publish a procedure guide short enough to hand to a student. Use those rather than writing your own. Worth having before the first practice: the rules of procedure and a one-page order-of-precedence table if one exists; the association’s own procedure guide; for mock trial, the rulebook, the tailored rules of evidence and the judge presentation deck, which is the best single artifact for showing students exactly how they are scored; and a position paper or brief template with the date it is due, since at several conferences the paper is a condition of award eligibility.

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Step 7. Debrief afterward, on purpose

The drive home is not a debrief. The evidence that a simulation teaches anything durable is strongest where a structured debrief followed, and competitive teams are the group most likely to skip it, because the awards ceremony feels like an ending. Scripts are free on The Debrief.

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The season, so you know what you have already missed

July and August	Moot court authorization letters. Host proposals for next year’s tournaments.
September	Moot court regional registration opens in waves. Model UN priority rates close.
October and November	Moot court regionals. Fall Model UN conferences. Model Arab League regionals begin. The Mid-Atlantic EU simulation.
Just before Thanksgiving	College mock trial regional assignments are posted.
February	College mock trial regionals. Model NATO. Harvard National Model UN.
March	Mock trial opening rounds. National Model UN in New York. Spring Model Arab League. National High School Model Arab League.
April	College mock trial nationals. Midwest Model EU. The spring policy competitions.
May	The National High School Mock Trial Championship.

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Two handouts, free to use

Every fee and deadline here is published by the association concerned. They change every year, so confirm before you commit money. If something is wrong, please say so.